Re: New US Bill re. Copyright/Federal Funding

[Mike Rossner <rossner@mail.rockefeller.edu>]

Pasted below is a letter sent to Peter Givler, Executive Director 
of The Association of American University Presses, in response to 
his <http://aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/letterFCRWA.pdf> support 
of the recent Fair Copyright in Research Works Act.  The exchange 
has been 
<http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/09/rockefeller-up-disavows-aaup-support.html>blogged 
by Peter Suber.

September 23, 2008

Peter Givler
Executive Director
Association of American University Presses

Dear Peter,

I am writing to take issue with your letter of September 10th, 
supporting the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which seeks 
to overturn the mandate on public access to NIH funded research. 
I would be grateful if you could let your member presses know on 
what basis you claim to speak on their behalf.  We deserve an 
accounting of how many member presses are indeed affected by the 
NIH mandate (that is, how many publish research articles 
resulting from NIH funded research), how many of those presses 
were consulted, and how many of them supported your efforts to 
overturn the mandate.  Without this information you are replaying 
the PRISM fiasco of the AAP - a lobbying effort that no-one would 
admit to supporting.

The Rockefeller University Press, as a member organization of the 
AAUP, strongly opposes your efforts to overturn the NIH mandate. 
In your letter you claim that "Copyright is the legal foundation 
that permits recovery of [our] costs and investment in publishing 
new work.  Weakening copyright protection through federal 
mandates that publications resulting from government-funded 
research be made freely available undermines that foundation and 
threatens the very system that makes such work of high value in 
the first place."  However, you do not provide any data to back 
up this statement.  We at the Rockefeller University Press have 
the data to show that this is not true.  We have released our 
content to the public 6 months after publication since January, 
2001, but our revenues have grown every year since then.  In May 
of this year, we took the additional step of allowing authors to 
retain copyright and distribution rights to the articles 
published in our journals.  Third parties can use all of our 
content under a modified Creative Commons License: see 
http://www.jcb.org/misc/terms.shtml. I do not anticipate that 
these new policies will affect our revenues.

I fully understand the value added by publishers.  However, our 
authors create the works we publish and should thus have rights 
over their distribution.  The public pays for NIH-funded work and 
should thus have access to the results.  The problem here is not 
the government trying to usurp publishers' rights, but the fact 
that publishers have for so long usurped these rights from 
authors and the public.

Yours sincerely,
Mike Rossner


Mike Rossner, Ph.D.
Executive Director
The Rockefeller University Press
New York, NY 10065
skype: mike_rossner
www.rockefeller.edu/rupress